Slavery and White Womanhood in Early Modern England

Abstract

This article argues that early modern literary and visual texts from Shakespeare's “Comedy of Errors” to Spenser's “Faerie Queene” repeatedly represent and render womanhood as a specifically and singularly white construction; in so doing, they establish the co-constitution of gender and race and their conscription by the contingencies of class. As this formation of white womanhood is in turn mobilized to underwrite the operations of violence and enslavement, white women themselves—and white womanhood as a politically and socially disciplined and disciplining category—emerge as not only the mediators but also the authors of these global and transhistorical processes.